He’s got so much material, and he’s always been so personal, that this body of work feels like it is in dialogue with itself: songs talk TO each other, songs update other songs. Over the course of his career, Eminem has built up an intimidating body of work, albums, stand-alone singles, guest-spots, collaborations (his group D12 made up of his buddies from “back in the day”, Bad Meets Evil with Royce da 5’9″). I’ve been working on this in bits and pieces for a month and I realize it’s too long but this is my bandwidth and these are difficult times and having this to work on has been really good! The placement of Revival in the surrounding context of his life and career is important, and although I started this piece wanting to talk about Revival, clearly it morphed into something else, all about the context as well as the journey of being his fan. Since then, Eminem has released not one but two albums. To start where we will end up – eventually: RevivalĮminem’s 9th studio album Revival was released in 2017, which already feels like it was 10 years ago. But once I started I couldn’t stop and the times are so bizarre right now I thought, Fuck it. Quarantine gave me the time, plus a week in a cabin in the damn woods isolated also gave me time. This has been building up (clearly) for a long time. For all the wrath and bloodshed on Music to Be Murdered By, its most provocative song is its least fictional.Yeah, so … I started out to write about Eminem’s 2017 album Revival, which critics and many fans hated, and the piece morphed into a career retrospective. The song worthy of the most discussion (and controversy), “Darkness,” is one such moment: What begins as a tender, personal tale soon reveals itself to be the disturbing account of a man committing mass murder from a Las Vegas hotel room, before ending with a series of breaking-news voiceovers reporting on real-life mass murders throughout America. It’s harder to hear shock-value sucker punches about domestic violence and disability-least of all because they risk discrediting the genuinely powerful moments that Eminem is so uniquely capable of. The divide between Eminem, lyrical savant and god of rap, and Slim Shady, a trigger-happy psychopath, has always been difficult to bridge. The beats on “Stepdad” and “Lock It Up” are second to none, while “Little Engine” and “Farewell” wouldn’t feel out of place on albums released two decades ago.īut the world has changed in two decades. Longtime stans will rejoice to find three (!) collaborations with Royce da 5’9”, particularly the frenetic “Yah Yah,” also featuring Q-Tip and Denaun. For better or worse, most of Music to Be Murdered By is simply Eminem doing what he does best: gratuitously savage, antagonistic rhymes for the pure, juvenile sake of it. Unlike his last two releases, this album is neither pop-leaning (with exception of one Ed Sheeran feature) nor a straight-up diss record. “They say these bars are like COVID,” he raps on “Gnat.” “You get ’em right off the bat.” But they’re timestamped with references to the pandemic lexicon: social distancing, hand sanitizer, quarantine, etc. The extra tracks, released just before Christmas, carry all the aggressive, sinister, occasionally unacceptable themes we’ve come to expect from the legendary rapper. And while some of us spent the year baking bread, watching TV, and chatting with friends online, Eminem pulled out his notepad. In January, before the world entered lockdown, we were reacquainted with Eminem’s chainsaw-wielding alter ego Slim Shady in an album as cold and uncompromising as the title suggests. And the same can be said of this deluxe edition, released almost a year later, featuring 16 new tracks. If you were hoping that an Eminem album released in 2020 would be less offensive, violent, or controversial, this album isn’t for you.
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